All love is alive
It flows in and around us
Through us it changes the current
Creates ebbs and echoes
Cascades into everything
Starts as a shimmer and transcends
Into a brilliance unparalleled
Like the warmth of our enduring sun
It nurtures us, protects us
Sometimes against ourselves
Love is a quantity and a quality
An emotion, a state of being, a frame of mind
It is the substance of acceptance and forgiveness
It is the language of tolerance and cooperation
Love will guide us if we let it,
Bond us if we use it
And grant us serenity and peace if we carry it with us
In our hearts and minds
I love you with all of my being
And you too have the capacity to love
One another…And yourself

Today, I saw beauty. Sharp little shards of ice fell in a furious rain as the sun lit their core with the dazzling luminance of starlight. For the shortest of exhales and at just the right angle when viewed, their crystalline forms contained rainbows. They then struck the hardened earth and shattered upon the ground in an exploding cascade of small sparkling splinters of ice. My breath was taken, my heart was waiting. When we think not to look we see what has meaning is everything.

In case you’ve been living under a rock recently, Emma Watson has been in the news a lot lately. I will post more later about some of my thoughts on gender equality, but for now you should read this article on HelloGiggles and more importantly the letter a fifteen year old wrote (originally published in The Telegraph) because he says it right.

She asked me to draw her a picture of a castle once. Her castle. She was a princess you see, and I thought her my queen. I could never fulfill this request. All I could draw, could paint, was her. She filled me up: my eyes when shut, my mouth when empty, my heart when unsuspecting.
It was just a picture of a fantasy, an image of a dream she once had. We dreamt so grande together once. But dreamers always weep.
A painting she could never touch, never taste, never feel. The sight of a place she would never be. With a glimpse she would visit but never plan to stay.
I could not paint you a castle, my love, for that would never suffice. I would have built you one. With this heart and these two hands I would have spent my life building something wonderful with you.
Now all I have are your framed images of joy and hope and love, captured recordings of expressions you showed me once. You showed me the real you and I gave you everything I knew to give. Something wasn’t right. Something wasn’t enough. I can’t look at them without crying. I can’t remember you without dying.
Our castle is lost, buried in the sand of time. I can’t even remember what it looks like; I was never good at drawing castles.

What mercurial, fleeting, clumsy and beautiful glances and smiles evoked with these humble, soft-spoken words. It is a gaze of wonder and puzzlement, fascination but most of all innocence. No guilt, although expected, is found in these moments shared. It is a marvelous and profound experience. Such beauty enthralls with a shy nervousness and sudden awkwardness of prolonged eyes meeting.

Irresistible, unattainable, unimaginable without sorrow. I feel only wonder.

Random words are merely a distraction. Our gazes meet and our faces communicate on some cosmic level. Stars explode in her eyes and a thousand suns live in those cheeks. If her smile were a door to be opened, I would remove its hinges. It would be as I have become–unhinged at the seams of my heart.

My chest floats towards you and my head swims away, trying to capture everything in these moments, to remember the wonder…the wonder of you. They echo within long after, ripples of their former selves, always dragging the weight of some dark, nebulous cloud behind. It waits there, the nothingness and bleakness of consequence with a dreaded, pale stare. It’s a familiar, lonely storm. Its calm taunts and tears at the hopes of possibilities and “maybe someday”s.

It steals your wonder and hides it away in the darkness.

I am left in want. Left in emptiness. There is a universe of love in me yearning to be spent. Billions of galaxies collide in my soul. Your wonder is a supernova, burning straight through. Don’t hide your light, shine bright! You shine the brightest in everything known. Your wonder, your light, will light anew the stars behind my eyes.

Perhaps you can see this too? The wonder in my eyes as I look at you as you look at me?

Don’t go. Don’t let it go. I would light forever the stars behind your eyes and die to brighten the suns within your cheeks.